Rehearsing Hospitalities

Rehearsing Hospitalities is a guiding principle for Frame to navigate within contemporary urgencies and to claim co-agency in the midst of a changing political, social and cultural environment. Rehearsing Hospitalities acknowledges hospitality as an open-ended skill that needs to be constantly rehearsed. Rehearsing Hospitalities fosters critical discourse, pluralistic sharing and collaboration between diverse (artistic) practitioners in contemporary societies. It takes the form of yearly autumn gatherings, public dialogues, a series of publications and peer-to-peer learning situations. This far-reaching collaborative process fosters the emergence of new practices and paradigms of political and cultural hospitality. Hosting and being hosted Hosting and being hosted are powerful tools within the contemporary worldly entanglements of ecocides, epistemic genocides and global poverty and migration driven by increasing income gaps. programme acknowledges that being hospitable towards a guest is always bound up with power structures that permit someone to be a host and others to be guests. Hospitality, as it is often understood, is an enlightened promise of emancipatory openness towards the “other”, but for the very same reason it often manifests itself as a force that tends to keep the subject and object – the included and the excluded – in their usual, rigid normalized order. New relations beyond binaries The aim of the Rehearsing Hospitalities is to support (artistic) communities to foster new host-guest and subject-object relations that go beyond binaries rooted in Western social and economic knowledge-power structures. We ask if there are hospitalities that exist beyond certain geographical, ontological and epistemological divisions such as binaries of north and south, central and peripheral, human and non-human, Finnish and non-Finnish, universal science and subaltern knowledges and many other, often essentialized differences that reproduce the toxicity of contemporary societies? Rehearsing Hospitalities regards hosting and guesting as a process that allows the emergence of new productive differences and connections. Its fundamental aim is to produce connections and differences differently in order to allow new artistic, cultural and political alliances and positions to come into being. Rehearsing Hospitalities in 2019 Hosting and visiting can be viewed as core practices for Frame Contemporary Art Finland, whose mandate is to foster and support international connections and networking with and within the contemporary art field in Finland. Over the coming years, hospitality will be Frame’s key practice for asking what kind of urgent international and worldly exchanges are crucial and meaningful and how they can be produced through diverse hospitalities. In 2019 the programme will address art and institutional potential to facilitate and mediate diverse epistemic hospitalities. It asks what kind of power structures of knowledge and knowing are contemporary art and artistic institutions dependent upon? Do practitioners in the art field reproduce oppressive Western epistemic paradigms through artistic practices and institutional structures, or is there space for emancipatory ways of knowing? Can diverse and hybrid ways of being situated between social classes, genders, races and cultural traditions open up a new epistemic process within the artistic field?